Farewell to Manzanar

Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston

Table of Contents

Plot Overview

Jeanne Wakatsuki was born on
September 26, 1934,
in Inglewood, California, to George Ko Wakatsuki and Riku Sugai
Wakatsuki. She spent her early childhood in Ocean Park, California,
where her father was a fisherman. She spent her teenage years in
Long Beach, California, and San Jose, California. After a brief
period in Long Beach after World War II, her family finally settled
in San Jose, where her father took up berry farming. Wakatsuki received
a degree in journalism from San Jose State University in 1956 and
a year later married her classmate and fellow writer John D. Houston.
John Houston’s tour in the United States Air Force took them to
England, and eventually to France, where Jeanne studied French civilization
at the Sorbonne, a prestigious university in Paris. She has been
honored with many awards and prizes, including the 1979 Woman
of Achievement Award from the National Women’s Political Caucus
and a 1976 Humanitas
Prize for her television adaptation of Farewell to Manzanar.
Her other works include Beyond Manzanar: Views of Asian American
Womanhood; Don’t Cry, It’s Only Thunder, co-authored with
Paul Hensler; and numerous essays and articles. Farewell
to Manzanar, her most famous work, recounts the three years
she and her family spent as prisoners at Manzanar Relocation Center
in the desert of southeastern California.

Farewell to Manzanar begins with the
U.S. entry into World War II after the Japanese attack on Pearl
Harbor in 1942, three
years after war had begun raging in Europe. Despite Europe’s calls
for American aid, U.S. public opinion was divided between isolationists,
who did not see the German dictator Adolf Hitler as a threat to the
United States, and the interventionists, who, led by President Franklin
D. Roosevelt, saw fascism as a global menace. The compromise reached
by these two groups was a policy called Lend-Lease, which allowed
the United States to aid the Allied forces with military supplies
and food in exchange for military bases in British and French territories
in the Caribbean and Pacific. The United States was generally more
concerned with protecting itself than with curbing the combined
Axis powers of Germany and Italy. When Japan joined the Axis, the
United States continued to refrain from intervening and chose to
respond with what President Roosevelt called “measures short of
war,” this time in the form of an embargo on scrap iron and steel
shipments to Japan. Japanese military leader General Hideki Tojo
sent representatives to Washington, D.C., to negotiate. But on December 7, 1941,
while negotiations were in progress, the Japanese attacked the headquarters
of the U.S. Navy’s Pacific fleet at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, killing
over 2,500 people
and severely crippling the U.S. fleet. President Roosevelt called
the attack on Pearl Harbor “a date which will live in infamy.” Three days
later the United States declared war on Japan. The declaration of
war made many Americans view Japanese not just as unwanted aliens
but as enemies to be feared. This irrational fear was the most direct
cause of the internment of people of Japanese descent, which Wakatsuki
describes in Farewell to Manzanar.

Japanese Immigration & Relocation

Jeanne Wakatsuki’s father was part of the first group
of Japanese people who immigrated to the United States, Hawaii,
Latin America, and Europe, who were called Issei, which
literally means “first generation” in Japanese. Those who immigrated
to the United States worked mainly as farmers, fisherman, servants,
and other unskilled laborers, but many eventually went to school
and became professional workers. A series of laws passed in the
early twentieth century tried to stop immigration from Japan by
preventing Issei from applying for naturalization and owning land
in California. In 1924,
the U.S. Congress passed an Immigration Act that ended all Japanese
immigration. The children of the Issei were called Nisei, which
means “second generation” in Japanese. Unlike their Issei parents,
the Nisei were Americans by virtue of being born in the United States,
and they adopted American language and customs more easily. Wakatsuki
was herself among the Nisei, who were educated primarily in the
United States, spoke little or no Japanese, and knew very little
about Japan.

Although hatred of Asians and Asian Americans has existed
in the United States since the first arrival of Chinese miners and
railroad workers in the mid-nineteenth century, the attack on Pearl Harbor
sparked a new period of overt racial fear. This hysteria culminated
in the U.S. War Department’s adoption of the Japanese-American relocation
program recounted in Farewell to Manzanar. Manzanar,
the camp in which the Wakatsuki family was imprisoned for three
years during the war, opened in 1942 and
was the first of ten identical camps scattered throughout the western
states. For three years, Manzanar was home to over 11,000 people
and consisted of close to 800 buildings.
On December 18, 1944,
the Supreme Court finally ruled that imprisonment of Nisei constituted the
illegal imprisonment of loyal U.S. citizens. But though the high court
ordered the camps to be shut down, it still took a full year for all
of them to close officially. For years the camps’ survivors fought for
compensation for the relocation policy, and in 1988 President Ronald
Reagan finally signed a bill guaranteeing $20,000 to
every living survivor of the camps. In 1990 President
George Bush made a public apology to Japanese Americans imprisoned
during the war and in 1992 declared
Manzanar a National Historic Site.